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on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML We installed a single turnstile to feel secure
freetime2 wrote 40 min ago:
My reaction reading this article is: why not both? Secure physical
access to the building, and fix the issue with jira credentials being
stored unencrypted in a cookie.
Physical security and controlling who has access to the building is
important. It was someone's job to ensure access to the building is
controlled - and while they may have botched the rollout to some
degree, it sounds like they eventually did their job (assuming they did
eventually re-enable the turnstiles - which isn't entirely clear from
the article).
The issue with the jira credentials also should have been fixed. It's
not clear what steps, if any, the author took to resolve this issue.
Did they do their job by accurately communicating the potential risks
and alternatives to the correct people within the organization? And if
that fell on deaf ears, maybe try somewhere else?
The article comes across as cynical and immature to me. Since the
turnstile solution wasn't 100% perfect, and since nobody fixed the
security problem that the author noticed, it all must just be security
"theater". But the reality is nothing is perfect, there will always be
a compromise between security and convenience, and priorities will
cause fixes for some issues delayed. But security is everyone's
responsibility, and we all need to do our part to push for the doing
the right thing whenever we can, and sometimes put up with a little
inconvenience.
jiggawatts wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
âIf the security is not in your face, then itâs not sufficiently
theatre!â
Thatâs a quote I tell security people in jest when they suggest yet
another door literally or figuratively slamming in someoneâs face to
let them know that there is a security procedure in place.
Seriously though, âsecurityâ is an overloaded word used for two
unrelated business goals:
1. Having security.
2. Appearing to have security.
The latter is strongly preferred by management that just wants someone
else or something else to blame.
To reiterate: this isnât an error! Itâs done on purpose.
arjie wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
Electronic audit trail makes SOC2 report easier for auditors. You can
use paper trail instead, but electronics makes it easier. Few things in
the world are required, but some of these compliance things are 'viral'
in that if you're a vendor to a guy who needs compliance you need to
practice the standards as well.
Besides, visibility is sufficient as a deterrent. Back in India,
there'd be a big difference between leaving an old man in a chair in
front of the shop and having exactly zero people in front of the shop.
There are classes of people you deter with the former who will not be
deterred by the latter. The old man is not 'security' - anyone
motivated can shut him up without much effort. And yet his presence
works.
jp57 wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Am I the only one who finds this post weird because this is a solved
problem? I've worked for 18 years at companies where everyone had to
badge into every building. There have never been lines of people
waiting to get in. Once I worked in a 12-story building. Of course,
the badging wasn't in the elevators: the elevator lobbies on each floor
had doors with badge readers.
The feel of the piece is that the entire effort was misguided, when the
real story seems to be, "My company was somehow unable to implement
something that every other company does easily."
ryanjshaw wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
Could have been worse. Anybody remember that story where the keycard
readers would randomly work and eventually it was discovered the log
file had grown huge and was being appended by reading the whole thing
into memory over the network, appending the line, and writing the whole
thing back out again, thus creating what the random pattern because I
guess it would sometimes time out?
alexchamberlain wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
I'm not going to comment on the security implications of either
situation, but is there a companion piece by the facilities team
complaining about the amount of paperwork required to install
turnstiles only for a software engineer to come along and lock them out
of Jira on a whim?
mikestew wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
Bad implementations do not "security theater" make. When I did some
work for a large coffee company, they had turnstiles at their building
entrances, and I don't remember any lines in the morning. The
scan/auth/enter process went about as fast as if there was no
turnstile.
I remember when I started at Microsoft decades ago that there were
still "old-timers" who were pissy about having to use card keys to
enter the building. With that attitude, man, did that ever explain
Microsoft application and OS security in the early 2000s.
ARandomerDude wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
Whenever I see this in practice I always think a determined killer
would clearly know not to attack the âsecureâ building. Rather,
attack the densely-packed line of people waiting to swipe their badges.
Unnervingly, this usually occurs to me when Iâm waiting patiently in
the densely packed line of fellow targets.
OutOfHere wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
If you as an employer are not doing physical engineering or working
with large or unsafe physical objects, you don't need an office,
period. For computer work alone, you don't need an office at all. If
you fix the "office theater", the physical security problems disappear.
firefoxd wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
Author here. I posted this on Sunday for a light read, but I guess it
got traction today.
Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going on the
turnstiles just as it did when I worked there. While the cookie
credentials are pushed aside. I think that's the security theater. We
are worried about supposed active shooters, different physical threats
while a backdoor to the company is left wide open. The turnstiles are
not useless, they give an active record of who is in the building, and
stop unauthorized people. But they also give so much comfort that we
neglect the other types of threats.
anigbrowl wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
You're right, but the consequences of different security failure are
different, no?
layer8 wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
I was disappointed by the lack of photo of the single turnstile.
compass_copium wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
I care a lot more about my life (or my car's catalytic converter,
which was stolen off my car in my work parking lot before they
inatalled a gate for the lot) than any of my work-related IT
credentials. Health and safety threats are a much bigger deal to
people than nebulous, difficult to exploit threats to IP.
angry_octet wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
Except the turnstiles and swipe cards do almost nothing against an
active shooter situation.
But missing in this discussion is a risk and consequence analysis.
If the risk is armed attackers, do something that targets that. For
physical theft, target that. Likewise IT risks. The core problem is
that risks were not being identified (systematically or in response
to expert feedback) and prioritised.
Incidentally, the solution to car park access is ALPRs, and the
solution to most of the physical security is solid core doors at
the workgroup level with EACS swipe and surveillance cameras there,
and at the front desk have face level 4k video surveillance. With
an on duty guard to resolve issues with access.
handoflixue wrote 51 min ago:
> The core problem is that risks were not being identified
(systematically or in response to expert feedback) and
prioritised.
Or the person who wrote the article just wasn't involved in that
loop, or otherwise disagreed on what threat models mattered.
latexr wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
> Based on the comments I see here, I think the focus is going on the
turnstiles just as it did when I worked there.
You titled the piece after the turnstiles and spent the overwhelming
majority of the post talking about them (and surrounding physical
features). The Jira ticket felt secondary, and when it was introduced
in the middle of the post I was genuinely confused, thinking why the
heck the card system was contacting Jira.
People reading your writing are going to focus on whatever you did
when you wrote it. The turnstiles read like the important part.
margalabargala wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
The part about Jira is important because it highlights that while
the company claims to take security seriously, they in fact do not
take it seriously.
The incompetence of the turnstiles makes it a good focus for the
story while the juxtaposition of the turnstiles with Jira exposes
the company's hypocrisy.
Dylan16807 wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
What's the threat model for cookie theft? That if someone gets
access to your company hard drive, but not enough access to
install a keylogger, then instead of invalidating a session you
also have to invalidate the password too?
It's an issue but I wouldn't call it a particularly big issue. I
don't think it's very damning for how much the company cares
about security.
And it sounds like the turnstiles did work for actual security?
Sure, they gave up on per-floor security, but that's a lot less
important.
Edit: And if employees are reusing passwords then we should be
getting them password managers (or SSO) as the top priority, much
more than we worry about logins in cookies inside the building.
I mean, there's a point where a single purpose password and a
login token become the same thing.
glitchcrab wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
I believe like that was the intent, but the (very few) mentions
of Jira feel like a bit of a non sequitur; they don't belong.
gosub100 wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
I don't think you could take over the company with a jira token.
Another factor for consideration with turnstiles is disability access
and fire egress. Those are covered by building code but since this is
a parable, it's worth noting that physical security has often caused
tragic stampedes that have killed many.
firefoxd wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
You are right, it's much harder to compromise a system with the
jira token, which is why it was the solution for the
username/password stored as cookies. Plus the token was never
exposed to the client.
kristianp wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
The majority of commenters don't actually read the article, or at
least not the whole thing.
horeszko wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
Perhaps part of the problem is that an active shooter is easy to
visualize and understand whereas unsecured credentials stored in
cookies are an abstract and difficult to visualize problem for
management.
Furthermore, turnstiles are easy to promote and take credit for.
Secure web authentication would have to be explained to and
understood by the boss's boss before credit for it could be claimed.
I suspect it's these aspects of organizational reality that results
in security theater.
margalabargala wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
I think it has less to do with ease of visualization and more to do
with priority of consequences.
Do a poll of whether people would prefer that a mass shooting or a
mass data breach occur at their place of work while they are there.
I bet I know which one wins.
mdavid626 wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
I feel the same way. Once I worked with junior developer, who was
really eager to develop stuff. He was tasked to create a development
environment, where we can tests features. Nothing fancy, just some
scripts and simple containers.
He used copies of the production database, but forgot to set the admin
password. The machine in ec2, public on the internet.
It was fixed few weeks later. But the connection still doesnât use
SSL, sends passwords plain text.
Yeah, he doesnât really like criticism about his workâ¦
I always think about the phrase:
âSecurity is our highest priorityâ
Sure.
CydeWeys wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
I'm not really sure what the point of this article is. Yes, obviously,
you need to implement systems that are secure and performant so that
you don't get a backed-up line of people waiting an hour just to get
into the office in the morning. But that's a notably flawed rollout;
millions of employees go into badge-in-required offices every day
without issue. And it's kind of hard to imagine running a large office
while lacking such basic physical security as "keep unauthorized people
out of the building". Having electronic badges and readers is table
stakes.
Rapzid wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
I thought the point is store your passwords in Redis because it's
WebSecure.
SiempreViernes wrote 8 hours 34 min ago:
Yeah, it got very strong "hello, I'm from the internet and this
meatspace thing you are doing is wrong" vibes.
jacquesm wrote 8 hours 41 min ago:
Funny. We had a security guard that had memorized all the faces of the
employees. If he knew you he'd buzz you through. If he didn't know you
you'd have to be vouched for by someone that he did know or by showing
your credentials. By day #3 he'd know you, and he also somehow knew
when you were no longer with the company.
There never was a line and there were 1400 people in those buildings.
I never realized how incredibly that guy's contribution was but this
story made it perfectly clear.
Also, I don't actually buy the story as related here. It would seem to
me that within minutes of that queue building up the turnstiles + card
system would be disabled because something clearly was not working.
hughw wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
Also... three buildings with 13 storeys? With all the trouble
builders go to to avoid 13th floors.
class3shock wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
This is the opposite of security theater. It was an apparently an
implementation of security with issues but restricting physical access,
both for people and vehicles, is absolutely a real improvement to
security.
chihuahua wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
Amazon is pretty serious about physical access security. Even back in
2002, you had to scan your badge while a security guard watches, to
check if you are the same person as the badge picture.
The same guard also checked if your dog was registered (I think my dog
got a badge with his picture, although I think that was just for fun,
and not functional)
And no easy ability to enter through side doors - you couldn't open a
side door with your badge. At the time, you could still lurk outside a
side door until someone else opens the door to exit. Eventually (11
years later) they locked all the side doors because they noticed people
doing this sort of thing.
More recently, I think you have to scan your badge to leave so they can
even track how long you're in the building, and know when you're
supposed to work on site but you were there only long enough to have a
coffee and then went home to continue working from home. This last part
is second-hand knowledge since I haven't work there in a long time.
russdill wrote 1 hour 43 min ago:
Unmonitored entraces/exits at Texas Instruments had turnstyles or
airlock style doors.
dheera wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
I won't miss the days I had to take a full day of meetings from my
car in the Amazon parking lot because there weren't enough meeting
rooms onsite, but the badge swipes at the main entrance in-between
meetings were needed to not be labeled as an "inconsistent badger".
It was laughable how much effort and money Amazon invested into badge
tracking and enforcement instead of directing funds at making the
office a nice place that people would want to spend time in and an
efficient place to get work done.
Gigachad wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
All stick and no carrot. These companies would have to spend so
much less effort dragging people in to the office if they just made
the office a good place to work.
xvedejas wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
> they locked all the side doors
And this didn't get them in trouble with the fire marshal?
SAI_Peregrinus wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
Instead of locking they could alarm when opened. Slap a big
"Emergency exit only, alarm will sound" sticker on it & link it
into the pull alarm system. Treat opening the door without an
emergency the same as pulling a fire alarm without an emergency.
amethyst wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
If it's anything like Facebook, the side entrances (which always
had guards sitting by them anyways) were all converted to alarmed
fire exits. So the fire marshal would still be happy, but it was
far less convenient for employees.
malfist wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
Amazon employees can just use all the ...water... bottles they keep
around their workstation to put out the fires.
kuhaku22 wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
> Additionally, the weapon is not limited to offensive use, as it
can be used to extinguish afterburn on oneself and teammates
HTML [1]: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Jarate
Scubabear68 wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
Many years ago I was doing due diligence on a point of sale hardware
company, I had to head up to an acquisition they had done. People
bitched and moaned about the level of physical security added, and when
I asked them why they were so upset, they told me to go to the loading
dock in the back.
The loading dock was kept completely open "because it's hot and we
don't have A/C back here!".
nine_k wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
This text is another reminder about the fact that as organizations
grow, they become more and more dysfunctional. They function despite
that, because the economies of scale are apparently still larger than
the loss of functionality due to the increased size.
Humans' most important achievement is the ability to create structures
larger than the Dunbar number. But this is not achieved for free.
(And this is another reason why I strive to work at startups more than
at huge corporations.)
okanat wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
It is not the economies of scale but entry cost increase per each new
player entering the same market. The real world markets are guarded,
price fixing oligopolies.
The most important thing a startup is expected to do is not to get
profitable quick but suffocate all possibilities of competition.
Dysfunctionality is not a bug, it is a feature of our economic
system.
jez wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
As others have mentioned, it comes down to the threat model, but
sometimes the threat model itself is uncomfortable to talk about.
Itâs sad to think about, but in my recollection a lot of
intra-building badge readers went up in response to the 2018 active
shooter situation at the YouTube HQ[1]. In cases like this, the threat
model is âconfine a hostile person to a specific part of the building
once theyâve gotten in while law enforcement arrives,â less than
preventing someone from coat tailing their way into the building at
all.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16748529
MrJobbo wrote 6 hours 40 min ago:
Hand out weapons to the workers?
bombcar wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
Places that really do care about security do exactly that. Military
bases routinely prohibit on-duty soldiers from carrying arms -
except the guards at the gate and the military police.
hinkley wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
No, the model there is something bad happened, we must do something.
This is something, so we will do it.
Iâm not saying that to diminish the value of the actual solution,
but what the people want is literally something to make them feel
better about a situation that is mostly out of their control.
Someone showed up to their workplace with a fucking gun. And now they
have to go there every day, and hope it doesnât happen again. They
want and need the theater.
bombcar wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
This is exactly it - most "security" isn't really built around
actual threat models, nor is it ever verified. IT security is
perhaps the weirdest in the world in that the security of your web
server will be constantly probed, whilst your front door could go
your entire lifetime and never be probed once.
Where people actually care about physical security, they develop
things that do actually work; and often are so unobtrusive you
never realize they're there.
Security theater necessitates that it be showy and in your face.
XorNot wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
Except a decent part of security is literally just deterrence.
Will my front door stop someone robbing my house if they want to?
No: I have sidelight windows you could just smash them and come
through.
But the one time a house I was in got robbed, it was because we
left the front door open and went out.
Which is odd if you think about it right? Statistically an open
front door rather implies someone is home, not away so it's a
terrible targeting priority - but our house was targeted and not
say, our neighbors who also wouldn't have been home that day.
People are quick to claim security theater, talk about threat
models, but equally ignore them anyway.
bombcar wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
The "I don't have to run faster than the bear; just faster than
you".
hinkley wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
PSA: If your buddy starts running from a brown bear, stand
very, very still. They like to chase things and they're way
faster than you are.
yannyu wrote 8 hours 1 min ago:
If an active shooter is the anticipated threat, how does a turnstile
effectively stop that? Many of these turnstiles are specifically
meant to allow people through in emergencies, and aren't strong
enough to withstand bullets or even a sturdy kick. The elevator
restrictions would be a better chokepoint, but as the article noted
they didn't turn those back on.
gosub100 wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
It doesn't effectively stop it, but it forces them to give up some
element of surprise. They have to either start the attack or start
a trespassing action that will initiate contact with police.
hinkley wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
Many turnstiles can be jumped over. In this case itâs more about
preventing theft and espionage.
I knew someone years and years ago who worked as an assistant to
lawyers. The firm had a second office in the state capital, turns
out someone was walking in and stealing laptops. I think they had
done it three times the last I had heard.
Lawyer laptops going missing is a problem. I donât know how they
ended up fixing that.
fc417fc802 wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
> Lawyer laptops going missing is a problem.
It shouldn't be. If there was a particular profession that I
would expect to properly secure their devices lawyers would be
near the top of the list.
Macha wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
I doubt these card readers would prevent someone leaving the part of
their building theyâre in, as thatâs a lesson written in charred
corpses and was a foundational aspect of health and safety becoming a
thing: [1] In theory it might prevent access to other buildings, but
equally often the card readers are around doors of mostly standard
glass or near internal windows of the same.
So if thatâs the motivation, it doesnât seem like a particularly
effective mitigation
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
mikey_p wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
Or the Victoria Hall disaster (183 dead), or Cocoanut Grove (492
dead), or The Station Nightclub (100 dead), or The Beverly Hills
Supper Club (165 dead), or.....
Also in what world is a badge reader going to contain an armed
gunman unless the walls, floors, doors, and windows are also
bulletproof??
(Triangle shirtwaist fire resulted in 146 dead)
Gigachad wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
I've volunteered at events hosted in older buildings before and
it's always such a top of mind thing to enforce a limit on the
number of people in the building at any moment. Since these
places have the capacity to hold a lot more people than can
escape through the exits in the event of a fire.
XorNot wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Theres footage online of a basic security door stopping an armed
robber from escaping despite him trying to shoot the lock.
Bullets aren't universal door openers, and shooting your way
through one lock doesn't magically unlock the next one.
mikeyouse wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
And the bullets and time spent getting through the door are
bullets and time that arenât used harming the people behind
that door.
nine_k wrote 8 hours 31 min ago:
If forced partition of a building were the primary goal, that goal
could be achieved without badges. Or, at least, without having to
badge into every door. Just have locks on every door that are
normally disengaged, but which can be locked remotely and promptly.
(While at it, I once worked on an access control system. It was aeons
ago; the system ran under OS/2. We installed it on a factory. It
worked well, until we ran it in demo mode under production load, that
is, the stream of morning shift turnstile registration events. The DB
melted. I solved the problem trivially: I noticed that the DB was
installed on a FAT volume for unknown reasons, so I moved it to an
HPFS volume, and increased the RAM cache for the disk to maximum.
Everything worked without a hitch then.)
avidiax wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
This actually exposes how this type of system is just security
theater usually.
A shooter can get a badge. Most partitions aren't bulletproof (and
probably don't have security film), and a shooter doesn't fear
getting a cut on some tempered glass.
The thing that would be effective is 24/7 security monitoring with
a building lockdown and reinforced entrances/partitions. Of course,
the victims whose badges were disabled during lockdown will sue.
So instead, just install badge readers and say that "something was
done".
tetha wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
One uncomfortable, but wise truth is: Actual security is bound to
the number of minutes until people with big guns arrive. A lot of
other measures just exist to bridge time and limit damages until
that happens.
We learned this during a funny situation when a customer sent us
the wrong question set for vendors. We were asked to clarify our
plans for example for an armed intrusion by an armed, hostile
force to seize protected assets from us. After some discussion,
we answered the equivalent of "Uh Sir. This is a software
company. We would surrender and try to call the cops".
During some laughter from the customer they told us, the only
part missing from that answer was the durability rating of our
safes and secure storages for assets, of which we had none,
because they just had to last until cops or reinforcements
arrived. That was a silly day.
avidiax wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
> Actual security is bound to the number of minutes until
people with big guns arrive
Ask the people of Uvalde, TX about that security model.
hinkley wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
Shooters tend to be mentally ill people who have been pushed too
far by a system, trying to burn that system down.
Killing a boss with a keycard that opens everything might not
just be possible but also preferable. Fuck you Tom, you made me
work through memawâs funeral
robomartin wrote 9 hours 14 min ago:
Interesting. I have worked in ITAR environments with serious security
and have never experienced 30 minute lines at the door. In fact, I
can't remember lines at all. Hard to understand what happened here.
Was it really a single turnstile for a building with over 10 floors?
That's kind of silly, isn't it? Mass transit operations have this
figured out. Most recently for me, taking the monorail in Las Vegas
for the CES show. No problems for the most part. It would be
interesting to know what this company actually installed.
wildzzz wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
I don't see how any of this wasn't already a problem. In the story,
everyone shows up to the office at the same time, how did they use to
work out the elevator issue? This story has a bunch of AI telltales
so I doubt it's real anyway.
TYPE_FASTER wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
In the story, they implemented table (building) and row (floor)
level permissions simultaneously. So you had to swipe into the
building, then in the elevator to get the elevator to stop at your
floor.
I guess I could see contention possibly happening as described if
everybody arrived almost simultaneously and both swiping points had
very high latency. But why not keep the door checkpoints armed and
disable the elevator swipes? That makes me think it's a contrived
example.
Liftyee wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
Lift (elevator) sidenote: there are fancy well designed ones where the
turnstile communicates what floor you need to go to to the lift, and a
"destination dispatch" system assigns/batches groups of passengers with
similar/same destinations to the same lift car to improve efficiency.
amluto wrote 9 hours 41 min ago:
Turnstiles have a genuine security benefit compared to door and
elevator security: convincing people not to let their coworkers in the
door or up the elevator is difficult because the actual request
(âclose the door behind you, this blocking the friendly person trying
to go through, so their scan their cardâ) is genuinely obnoxious. But
a turnstile really does fundamentally let one person through, even if
itâs easy to bypass.
Izkata wrote 7 hours 7 min ago:
And then there's full-body turnstiles. Ugly, but good luck bypassing
that.
TYPE_FASTER wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
Put on a UPS/FedEx uniform, put somebody in a box, and drop them
off at receiving.
XorNot wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
So they can die from dehydration while we spend 3 days trying to
figure out who ordered the weird coffin sized box no ones coming
to claim?
hamdingers wrote 9 hours 45 min ago:
I worked at a company that had effectively no physical security during
work hours until the second time someone came in during lunch and stole
an armload of laptops.
Then we got card readers and a staffed front desk, and discovered our
snack budget was too high because people from other companies on other
floors were coming to ours for snacks too.
I never felt the office was insecure, except in retrospect once it was
actually secure.
lelandfe wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
It's been really, really top of mind here in NYC after a guy walked
into a Midtown building last year and gunned down people.
3rodents wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
Twitch had badged entry and still managed to have a couple of
incidents in which people walked in off the street to steal laptops.
No snack theft though, thankfully some things are sacred.
russdill wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
Happened to me in downtown San Francisco. We had keycards, but my
manager helpfully held the door for someone.
fxtentacle wrote 6 hours 6 min ago:
I once lived in Singapore for a while and we were all sure that
nobody would steal anything anyway, so we just never bothered to lock
the doors. (That was also very helpful if you wanted to stop for a
quick coffee with a date in the middle of the night.) You could see
the MacBooks from the street, but nothing ever went missing. I
donât know what exactly it was, but Singapore felt incredibly safe
and crime-free.
jiggawatts wrote 3 hours 54 min ago:
I used to accumulate a pile of change on my desk from buying
coffees.
Never got touched across about a hundred different offices around
Australia (Iâm a consultant).
Except once: the pile was replaced by a $50 note and a hand written
apology saying the guilty party needed change for the parking lot
machine. I had less than $30 there in coins so⦠profit!
stevage wrote 4 hours 42 min ago:
Wait, explain the quick coffee bit? You'd let yourself into a
random person's house to make coffee?
landgenoot wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
I think it's the coffee machine at the office
ThrowawayTestr wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
>I donât know what exactly it was, but Singapore felt incredibly
safe and crime-free.
The extreme punishments for breaking the law might have something
to do with it.
some_random wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
It's not actually the extreme punishments, it's the consistent
small punishments. It's that you'll actually, seriously get a
ticket for littering, even if it's a relatively small ticket. The
"Fine City" enforces it's vision in a ubiquitous way, so people
just don't break the rules.
brirec wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
The failings of the broken windows theory[1] would strongly
disagree.
[1]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory?wp...
Gigachad wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
This seems like the most effective solution. Imagine if you
knew that if you littered, there is a 100% chance you would get
a $10 fine immediately. Almost no one would litter ever again,
even though the fine is much smaller than the fine is in most
countries.
Problem is it just takes a lot of resources to police, more
than the fine revenue. But with CCTV and computer vision it's
getting increasingly cheap.
irjustin wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
That is just the part that gets the most press. Having lived here
for a while now.
1. At a young age, you're taught to follow the rules.
2. "Someone's always watching". Lots of CCTV. Community reports.
3. Plenty of police who have the ability and time to investigate
even the most petty things.
Trust in the system starts with 1 but is really carried day to
day by 3.
wredcoll wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
> The extreme punishments for breaking the law might have
something to do with it.
Historically speaking, this is almost never true. People
constantly think the solution is crueler punishments and we have
hundreds of years of records of what happens.
broken-kebab wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
"Hundreds of years of records" sounds like a big exaggeration.
I don't think we can reliable talk about more than 150 years,
and even that would be sparse, covering only some lucky
countries. And this data is hard to evaluate as adjusting it to
culture shifts, economy changes, and even to what constitutes
"cruel" in different periods isn't easy.
I think, it's reasonable to suspect that demonstrative cruelty
in crime punishment may have bad side-effects in the long run,
but there are just a few cases in recent history where at least
short-term outcomes seem to support the claim that it may
reduce crime levels.
hamdingers wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
People who commit crimes generally do not think they will be
caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern to them.
The better way to deter crime[1] is to convince more of the
public that people who commit crimes are usually caught.
Preferably by actually catching people who commit crimes.
1. aside from the obviously effective but difficult to
implement deterrent of meeting everyone's physical needs
cortesoft wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
A lot of crimes are also committed by people who genuinely
don't think about the consequences when they are acting. It
doesn't matter how bad or how certain the consequence is,
because they aren't thinking about it at all.
akoboldfrying wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
But apparently there are far fewer such people in
Singapore. How would you explain this?
I think the explanation is that growing up in an
environment where even small infringements are consistently
punished makes people think about the consequences more.
StopDisinfo910 wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
I don't think it explains everything.
I think social norms have a lot to do with it. It's like the
actual social costs of being the one who broke the social trust
is so high it dissuades people.
It worked for me on a lower level. Everyone cut queues and will
grab an empty seat if it looks available at a packed restaurant
here so I do it too but I never did that when I lived in
Singapore because I knew that's not how things work there and
people would genuinely be mad at me for doing it.
It's like a self-fulfilling, self-improving environment. Same
with Japan and cleanliness.
State provided housing for most and a booming economy with low
unemployment must help too.
mikepurvis wrote 6 hours 51 min ago:
What year was that? I was at a startup from 2010 onward and I'm
pretty sure we had physical keys until about twelve people and after
that it was straight to badges. There was never a time where you
could just walk in.
hamdingers wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Late 2010s. We actually did have badges but the doors were only
locked outside work hours, so nobody carried them.
The thief had to walk past a security desk in the lobby, take the
elevator up to our floor, walk past a front desk to the kitchen,
then open a door to get to the office area. Probably sounded like
enough layers for whoever was in charge of security at the time,
but both desks were frequently unoccupied during lunch.
I know we had cameras too, but I never got updates on the
investigation. I suspect it was an employee at one of the other
companies in our building.
mikepurvis wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
Interesting. I feel like most places still make you badge into
the doors during business hours, and even specifically encourage
not permitting tailgating, sometimes tied to a purported safety
concern around being able to know who is in the building in an
emergency... though honestly at most shops I bet no one has any
idea how to get a report like "everyone who has badged in in
since 6am this morning".
PunchyHamster wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
How the fuck nobody notices some randoms coming to steal snacks in
the first place ?
nkrisc wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
I worked somewhere with a few hundred employees across 3 floors. If
someone wearing business casual walked onto our floor I would have
no idea if they worked for us or not.
bombcar wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
There's a huge difference between a company with its own building,
and a company that shares a building in some way with other
companies.
Many I've seen have it setup so that if you get past the security
guard at the lobby, you effectively had full reign of the entire
building, including many companies that wouldn't lock the doors or
common areas.
hamdingers wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
~400 person company spread across a few floors, but only one
kitchen. It wasn't weird for people you didn't recognize to come
off the elevator and get snacks to take back to their floor.
kjs3 wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
We have nearly a 1000 people in my building. I don't track every
rando that walks by, nor reasonably could I.
mystifyingpoi wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
I work at a company of ~200 people and I already don't recognize
everyone. Seeing an unknown face, I just assume they are from some
distant team that I never had to interact with, say hi and move on.
knallfrosch wrote 9 hours 49 min ago:
Those turnstiles were inefficient (slowed legitimate users down), but
not security theater (they really blocked unauthorized access.)
heytakeiteasy wrote 10 hours 3 min ago:
Security theater, perhaps. Don't underestimate the degree to which
those turnstiles were intended to serve the purpose of tracking
employees' movements.
Normal_gaussian wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
There is nothing here that really tells us the turnstile was security
theatre? Or the various key card swipes.
There are many ways to skin a cat; and there are many ways to ensure
authenticated / trusted access. If you have site wide security gates,
it means you know everyone on site / on a given floor conforms to a
given minimal security or trust level, so now you can conduct
operations in that area with more freedom. This makes the risk
assessments for other actions so much simpler. e.g. Now when the
apprentice IT tech leaves the SLT's laptop trolley in the corridor it
doesn't trigger a reflash of all of the machines. Or when a key
individual misplaces their keyfob (e.g. in the kitchen) it doesn't
trigger a lockdown of core systems, because they had it on the way in
and its reasonable to trust that nobody stole it.
Obviously the implementation was botched in this case - but "feel
secure" and "security theatre" are right as often as they are wrong.
kuhaku22 wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
> Obviously the implementation was botched in this case
The long wait times could easily have been fixed by staggering
employee start times. You could even optimize it per building/floor.
Sadly, a lot of bureaucrats lack the imagination to do simple stuff
like this. (Anyone with a desperate need to have 9 am meetings would
just have to suck it up)
mystifyingpoi wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
> staggering employee start times
Immediately reminds me of Severance.
formerly_proven wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
Card readers in elevators are theater though. You would need separate
vestibules to actually secure entry via elevator. Thatâs why most
buildings have those.
XorNot wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
Are they? The goal isn't to draw a hard boundary it's to create
layered defenses which increase the difficulty and reduce
opportunity.
If instead of open access you need to tailgate on a limited set of
employees, that increases difficulty considerably and makes the
opportunity much less common.
Real security analysis works this way: you don't assume you can
build a wall which is never breached.
mikeryan wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
It also doesnât describe any of the why the additional security
measures were put in place. It sounds arbitrary, but could be an
insurance or regulatory requirement that the acquiring company needed
to meet. Similar for the login issue, itâs suboptimal but what
constraints caused that solution to be put in place? And why wasnât
it fixed?
Sans context thereâs not a lot to complain about here.
Apreche wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
Iâve been to many very large office buildings with turnstile systems,
and I have never seen any kind of line, even during the busiest hours.
Yes, they are security theater to a large extent, but they do
legitimately help to make the elevators run a lot more efficiently.
hinkley wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
Iâve only worked two places as big as OP described, but you
probably see this more when your company leases a third of a floor on
a giant office building. Or a floor and a half, or two half floors
because it was easier to expand onto the 12th floor.
Elevators do back up, especially when everyone has to scan for their
floor. Not like the author suggests, but you can lose a good few
minutes a couple times a day that way. It does start some people on
an exercise kick of using the stairwell to leave the building. Not
great exercise though.
The one place solved this by not building parking garages. Flat
parking that went to the horizon. By the time I got to work the spot
I parked at was going to be over half a mile from my desk. I bought a
grownup scooter with oversized wheels, first day I used it security
tracked me down and said those arenât allowed on company property
(I had half a mind to use it on the sidewalks around the outside of
the property but didnât, since Iâd still be carrying the stupid
thing into the building). But I spent a lot on that scooter and had
no other use for it, so I was mad.
My coworker had convinced me that this was billable hours (court
precedent about a factory that had a bad setup for employees to get
to the time clock) so I started phoning into standup when I was on
site but still eight minutes from my desk.
When youâre walking half a mile to the security doors it tends to
stagger the arrival times. Which is a feature, if the dumbest one.
CoffeeOnWrite wrote 10 hours 18 min ago:
Allegations of security theater should start with discussing the threat
model. This is just somebody complaining about a crappy key card
system.
ableal wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
To be fair, he was pointing out that the invisible "credentials in
cookies" issue was much harder to get fixed:
The turnstiles were visible. They were expensive. They disrupted
everyone's day and made headlines in company-wide emails. Management
could point to them and say that we're taking security seriously.
Meanwhile, thousands of employees had their Jira credentials stored
in cookies. A vulnerability that could expose our entire project
management system. But that fix required documentation, vendor
approval, a month of convincing people it mattered. A whole lot of
begging.
CoffeeOnWrite wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
Again, not security theater. Signs of general dysfunction yes.
Embarrassing. Fun to tease about for sure.
Aside: the more times I re-read the article the more annoyed I am
with the self-righteous tone. It feels like the author is mimicking
the style of legendary Usenet posts, but the story just isnât
that interesting and the writing not that witty, it falls flat.
summermusic wrote 9 hours 2 min ago:
If it isn't outright fake it's at least embellished. It even has
the "and then everyone clapped" line!
mcbits wrote 9 hours 18 min ago:
The writing is clearly AI-generated or at least AI-assisted, so I
think it's safe to assume it's also a work of fiction.
leephillips wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
Iâll take your word for that. I donât know how to tell. But
I did notice that the writing was conspicuously terrible
throughout. Entire sentences make no sense, such as âI'd slip
in suspiciously while they contemplated the email that clearly
said not to let anyone in with your own card.â
Rapzid wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
Turnstiles aren't theater and Redis doesn't make password
storage secure so the entire thing seems a little
el-el-emish..
But what about that sentence does that not make sense? They
are describing tailgating..
leephillips wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
It doesnât make sense as a whole. But, for example, what
was he suspicious of?
Rapzid wrote 6 hours 49 min ago:
"I'd slip in suspiciously" means the "slipping in" was
suspicious.
leephillips wrote 6 hours 37 min ago:
You sure? I wasnât.
âJohn regarded Mary suspiciouslyâ
âSharon suspected her husband of cheating. She looked
through his emails suspiciously.â
tczMUFlmoNk wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
It can mean either. "Suspicious behavior" doesn't
mean that the behavior thinks that you've done
something wrong.
"She's suspicious" can mean either that I suspect her
intentions or that she suspects someone else's
intentions.
mcbits wrote 7 hours 16 min ago:
The last two paragraphs are mainly what stood out. I've spent
hours trying to get LLMs to stop writing like that. It's hard
because you can't just say things like "don't write lists of
three items" because sometimes you want a list of three
items. The rest of the text could be written by a person as
it's kind of disjointed, but that could also be the result of
trying to prompt out the AI-isms.
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